Following the asphalt parking lot around to the back of the building, I search the darkness for my stranger but don’t find him.
Gravel crunches and footsteps sound.
They’re following me.
I draw a long inhalation deep into my lungs. Get away. You must get away.
Yet I’ve made a tactical mistake in heading around back where no one can see me. I’d assumed my stranger would be back here, smoking a cigarette or doing whatever it is he didn’t want me to see him doing.
“Circle around. We’ve got her. She’s right there near the fence.”
To my right, I can make out the tallest man running to get ahead of me. I pick up my pace into a full-out sprint. It’s a race with no finish line. I refuse to let this be the end . . . of me.
I can hear a man behind me cursing, but the pounding of footsteps makes me think it’s all three in pursuit, including the married man. I don’t dare look back because the tall one with the long legs is cutting a diagonal path in my direction. Our eyes connect and I will myself to go faster.
I break eye contact and am turning away when I hear him scream out in pain. “Ahhh, Christ.” Surprised, I watch him grab his thigh and fall to the ground. I keep going though, thanking my lucky stars fate intervened.
“Who the fuck is that?” one of my pursuers shouts. Close behind me and far too close for comfort.
“Did you see that? He nailed Charlie in the thigh with a knife.”
“We gonna help him?”
“Let’s grab this bitch first.”
It’s at this precise moment, fate gives me the middle finger and my foot snags in the afghan that’s slipped down my body. I stumble. Regain my balance.
But the damage is done.
One of them shoves me, and this time, I tumble to the ground and down onto all fours. My knees bark out in protest as my skin slides against the asphalt.
I freeze when hear two loud pops.
Then both my pursuers crash down like falling trees on either side of me.
Something wet hits my left calf and right forearm. Acrid-smelling.
Blood.
It takes all my courage not to scream. I lift my head, searching for something . . . searching for someone . . . a stranger who likes knives.
The asphalt lot is eerily silent. Which is why the faint gasp I make sounds like a freight train rumbling through. Over by what has to be the bathroom door, a shadowy figure stands beneath a floodlight. Arms folded. Legs braced apart. Seeming more like an observer than an active participant in this horror show.
Anger positively radiates across the vacant space.
My throat hitches as I come up onto my feet. Careful not to look at the two men. Not wanting to see their bullet wounds and them laid out in pain. Well deserved or not.
I shuffle toward my stranger. Fighting my unsteady gate, my panic, this strange sense of euphoria making my head spin.
When I’m within arm’s reach, he gruffly says, “You hurt?”
“Just scraped my knees.” My chin hurts. My head pounds. And a little piece of my soul must ache at the idea that I’m indirectly responsible for their brutal injuries, right? Yet the truth is, I feel a lightness of spirit. A senseless euphoria.
My stranger. My protector.
He did this for me.
He sweeps forward. I gasp as he scoops me up and briskly walks back around to the front of the building where he unlocks his pickup, deposits me into the passenger’s seat, locks the doors, and disappears back around the building.
When he reappears, he’s carrying a knife.
A few seconds later, we’re driving off, leaving the three men and the truck stop are behind us.
“You’ve got blood on your blanket,” he tells me a short time later. His tone is brisk, cold. Stating a fact rather than condolences.
“Afghan. It’s my mama’s afghan.” I stare down at it, at my forearm, at my leg.
And as I turn to finally look at him, at his hands.
Nausea hits me like an amusement park ride. The Cyclone Spinner. The House of Horrors.
“It’s adrenaline kicking in. It’ll pass.” He rolls down the windows, and a blast of warm air hits me face.
“Blood. It’s the blood and what it . . . represents.”
“I did what I had to do.”
“You shot them because of me. They shouldn’t have been chasing me but without emergency help, now they could die because of me.” I turn to find him watching me. A chill races up my spine. There’s a tension in his body, a stiffness. He’s angry. No . . . he’s furious.
I swallow hard, suddenly unsure of him. Of everything. I don’t mention calling for an ambulance again.
We drive another twenty miles until he pulls into another rest stop and parks the pickup off to the side of the building.
“Get out,” he orders, already in motion himself.
I do as he asks, and as he waves me forward and opens a door, I realize why we’ve stopped.
A restroom.
I step by him and inside am immediately assaulted by the smell of Lysol and bleach. Kylie and I always preferred Pine-Sol’s more natural scent. But at least it’s not Public Urine–Sol.
Great, I’ll live a day longer knowing I’ve seen my first clean truck-stop bathroom.
He enters behind me, shuts the door and locks it, then tosses the door key onto the sink vanity.
Insurance no one will interrupt us.
That’s a good thing, right?
He removes the afghan from around my shoulders, moves away from me to drop my duffle bag on a long wooden bench opposite the showers, and stalks over to the sink. Turning on the water, he meticulously washes his hands before rinsing the blood out of my afghan.
I don’t know what to say or how to feel. He’s like a stone, cold and unbendable, but when you somehow manage to flip it over, a lovely surprise lay anchored to the bottom of it.
“What’s going to happen now?”
He sighs like my question annoys him. “Nothing.”
“They’ll talk. You don’t think the police will come after us?”
“Forget about them.”
I shake my head. “Forget? I’ve got their blood on my body.”
“And I’ve got their blood on my hands.”
I gasp at his choice of wording. No. There was no need to kill them. He simply stopped them from hurting me.
He was protecting me.
He pauses to turn off the faucet and wring out the patch of afghan he’s carefully soaped and rinsed clean. “Listen, Madelyn. Stop asking questions and you won’t be disappointed,” he snaps.
I grit my teeth. “I deserve answers. You don’t understand what’s happened to me since you dropped me off in San Diego . . .” I suck in a breath, the memory of the brutal events in Cabo playing out in my head.
He moves across the clean tiled flooring, folds my afghan, and sets it on top of my bag. “You survived.”
I frown. Does he mean this as a question, like “How did you survive?”
“My best friend was hurt. Her friend dead. Murdered. It should have been me.”
“But it wasn’t.”
A statement, not a question. My frown deepens with confusion. “No.”
I bite my lip, considering all that’s happened. The horrible bloodshed in Cabo. My best friend, Luciana, who’d been spying on me for her brother, Diego. My stranger, who knows about Cabo. Kylie. I draw a mental web of all these loose bits of information, searching to classify everything to one commonality, and despite the blood coating my skin, despite the stranger staring down at me, my mind comes to rest on a single undeniable conclusion.